Attempts to change the course of industrial civilization without changing the narratives and symbols that guide it on its way are doomed to failure. Behind this specific technical problem lies a much vaster predicament -– the failure of the Enlightenment project of rebuilding human civilization on the foundations of reason.
John Michael Greer -- The Archdruid Report
Mar. 1, 2007 -- Around once a month, since I first started this blog, I get plans in the mail for saving the world. I don’t mean this last phrase derisively; the plans come from people who are deeply concerned about the consequences of peak oil, global warming, and other manifestations of the predicament of industrial society, and set out to find a solution. Many of them are extremely well crafted and, if put into place, would accomplish much. Every one of them, even the loopiest, would likely have better results than the industrial world’s current policy of sleepwalking toward the abyss.
The most recent example arrived a couple of days ago, courtesy of Tom Wayburn, a Texas engineer and a reader of this blog; you’ll find his plan online at http://www.dematerialism.net and http://dematerialism.blogspot.com. He’s far from alone in his efforts. M. King Hubbert himself proposed a scheme of social and economic reorganization to deal with peak oil back in the 1970s; you can find it at http://www.energybulletin.net/3800.html. These two are only a drop in the oil bucket, of course. Go looking for peak oil solutions online or in bookstores and you can find them by the dozen.
The best publicized of them, and indeed one of the best in practical terms, is the oil depletion protocol originally crafted by the Hydrocarbon Depletion Study Group at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. Richard Heinberg’s latest book The Oil Depletion Protocol does a fine job of explaining the protocol and showing how it could manage the transition to a sustainable society. It’s an extremely well thought out plan, and if implemented, would almost certainly make the coming of the deindustrial age a good deal less ugly than it will otherwise be. The only criticism it merits is that its chances of actually being put into effect make a snowball in hell look like a safe investment.
Unfortunately, the same sort of criticism can be leveled at the entire genre of peak oil solutions, from Tom Wayburn’s project to such highly publicized plans as the oil depletion protocol or the one presented in Lester Brown’s much-discussed book Plan B. There has never been a shortage of good ideas for dealing with peak oil or, for that matter, any other aspect of the predicament of industrial society. What has been lacking consistently is the collective will to put any of those ideas into practice.
It bears noticing that between 1956, when Hubbert originally announced the approach of peak oil, and the present moment, a remarkable paradox has unfolded. On the one hand, the evidence for the imminence and catastrophic potential of peak oil has grown steadily more convincing. On the other hand, the prospect that any constructive response to peak oil will actually be implemented has grown steadily more distant. Despite occasional bursts of lip service, every major political party in every major nation in the industrial world supports pro-growth economic policies that move the world further away from a transition to sustainability with each passing day, and the more imminent and obvious the dangers become, the more stubbornly the world’s political and economic systems cling to exactly the policies that guarantee the worst possible outcome in the not- very- long run.
Now a good part of this astonishing failure of will and vision can be traced to familiar factors. Many peak oil authors have talked about the way that today’s political and economic systems have perpetual growth hardwired into them, and malfunction or break down completely when the rate of growth even starts to approach zero. Many of them, myself among them, have also discussed the way that people’s ability to weigh benefits against risks breaks down just as spectacularly when the benefits are immediate and the risks lie somewhere in the indefinite future. Still, there’s more to the issue than this. The same underground realm of mythic narratives and magical symbols I’ve been trying to explore in recent posts has a major role in setting the stage for the paradox just outlined.
The crux of the matter, I suggest, is that attempts to change the course of industrial civilization without changing the narratives and symbols that guide it on its way are doomed to failure, and those narratives and symbols cannot be changed effectively with the toolkit that peak oil advocates have used up to this point. Behind this specific technical problem lies a much vaster predicament -– the failure of the Enlightenment project of rebuilding human civilization on the foundations of reason.
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